Some time around 1949, when it became clear to Topps that their one cent version of Bazooka was going to be a monster seller, they started converting their "changemaker" Topps Gum, previously a traditional wafer "tab" (like penny Bazooka) into a Chiclets style product. This was a two-fold process.
First, Topps reconfigured the one cent version of their namesake gum into mint coated "nuggets" like this:
Those all carry 1949 copyrights and it's my understanding they were primarily meant for military field ration kits. I believe but cannot currently confirm, these one cent tabs also sold at retail. However, a five cent version certainly did and Topps made up a matchbook to promote the product:
That little chef mixing up a batch of ammoniated gum is today's quarry. It's hard to see but his toque says "Mr. Topps" in what is a quite mysterious advertising technique, i.e. obscuring your company name:
The packaging was eventually reconfigured:
I've blogged at length about Topps Gum over the years and won't rehash it here, just find and click on the appropriate label. What I haven't posted about though, is Mr. Topps long-lived career as a company pitchman.
Topps would, from time-to-time, refresh their Bozo ball gum product and by 1971 had come up with a colorful redesign of the packaging as this box top shows:
I'll be damned if that isn't our old friend Mr. Topps! He's been updated and lost the old toque but it's clearly the same character. Here's a closeup, he's got more cauldrons now:
Here he is pouring out some grape candy coating:
Why Topps decided to use a character from almost a quarter century prior again is a question that will probably never be answered but I think it's pretty cool. Now, on to another cool thing...
Bozo ball gum was not affiliated with Bozo the Clown, although it's up-and-down past may indicate some legal battles with Larry Harmon had occurred. But what's funny is that the clown was originally created as a macot for Capitol Records in 1949 and they sold various rights and licenses to the character to Harmon in 1956. The two corporate entities were getting along well enough by 1979 1969 to combine forces for this oddball product:
(UPDATE: 6/14/23: Snack food wizard Jason Liebig via Friend o'the Archive Lonnie Cummins advises this is a 1969 product).
Here's the commodity code:
So the product you would think best associated with Bozo the Clown didn't make the cut and Topps went with Gold Rush instead, for what looks to be a very scarce package. There would also seem to be some additional train cars in the series, which I'm guessing never made it to a full retail release.
It's a pretty well know fact, at least among collectors of 1953 Topps Baseball cards, that three cards feature background ads for the company that produced the set. There's a couple of dozen "generic" ad representations as well, plus a handful that feature parts of actual ballpark billboard ads (Camel cigarettes for one) but the Topps ones are the most fun:
Yes, the Dodgers relief ace Clem Labine gets the first Topps ad on card #14, which seems appropriate, although that background in no way resembles Ebbets Field. We have to wait for the high numbers (#252) to find the next one:
Well, that ain't Fenway! Willie Miranda, card # 278, gives us our final Topps ad, somewhat reminiscent of Labine's I think:
However, I believe there may be another Topps homage and it leads off the set. Take a look at the background of Jackie Robinson's card:
At first glance it seems like it could be a ballpark superstructure looming behind Jackie but it's not Ebbets Field and there's no way the Brooklyn based Topps Chewing Gum would allow an image of the Polo Grounds - which I guess it vaguely resembles - appear on a Dodgers card. If you look closely, it doesn't really look like a ballpark at all as there are no stands visible. In fact, the image used to create this card, a photograph by Brooklyn's team photographer Barney Stein, has no background, except for some clouds:
So what is it? Well, my money is on a slightly cleaned up view of the elevated Gowanus Expressway superstructure and, behind it, Topps HQ at Bush Terminal. Here's a couple shots of the Gowanus from the wonderful Newtown Pentacle:
This is about 16 blocks south of Topps HQ - note the cars parked underneath (and random tire-yikes!). Sy Berger and Woody Gelman, who car pooled with some other Topps employees from their homes on Long Island, would park under the viaduct near the Topps office in Bush Terminal.
Here's another shot of the underbelly:
Now here's a shot of their Bush Terminal building in 1940, courtesy of Brownstoner (their offices were in the second building down along the viaduct from the larger one sporting the ad):
Well, take a look at this cropped close up of the Robinson card:
I'm pretty sure that's the roofline of their Bush Terminal building behind the viaduct! It's all slightly altered by the artist but I have to think Woody Gelman could have been behind this little in-joke.
It's not the only card to feature the environs of their Brooklyn headquarters. In 1955 the Rails & Sails set had a card that prominently featured not only Bazooka bubble gum, but what looks to be a small sliver of the same Gowanus Expressway viaduct, off to the right of the boxcar; quite appropriate given the extensive railroad tracks in the facility:
A little curveball today kids, or maybe just a frisbee slider. Poring through various eBay listings of late, I came across an image from the 1967 "Topps "Venezuelan set of Luis Aparicio. Luis Aparicio, Sr. that is, father of Luis Aparicio Jr., the Hall-of-Fame shortstop.
Now, he is not a new name, nor is his legacy as a player, manager and foundational pillar of Venezuelan baseball lost on me. I've been delving into the various winter leagues and tournaments that sprang up in earnest following World War 2 and for some reason I just decided to take a look at the man you see here:
I've covered the "3 in 1" 1967 Venezuelan "Topps" set a few times here, and the specific Venezuelan Winter League subset as well and it's a wonderful issue, with all sorts of ins and outs. The 138 subject VWL subset offers a substantial look at the wide array of players and coaches who participated in 1967-68. Obviously, Aparicio is one of the coaches.
Luis Aparicio Ortega (the mother's name comes after the father's name) was born on August 28, 1912 in Maracaibo (an oil rich city in Zulia state) and was an athletic kid who gravitated to football (soccer), playing as a Forward for several talented teams in Venezuela. He also played baseball, founding a local team with his brother Ernesto, and that was the sport he made his own. Aparicio would soon become renowned as the slickest fielding shortstop in Venezuela.
In 1931 Luis, Sr. played in his first National Baseball Series and would be a perennial participant. In the mid-1930's he became the first Venezuelan born player to appear for a team outside of the country and in 1946 was a founder of the Venezuelan Professional Baseball League, both playing and the managing, permanently cementing his already notable status as a scion of baseball in his home country. stadium in Maracaibo is named after him in honor.
After retiring from active play in 1953, where he had Luis, Jr. pinch hit for him in the season opening game for Gavilanes, Aparicio remained a manager, essentially gravitating to where his son played and in 1962 found himself at the helm of the newly rebranded Tiburones de la Guaira, or as we would know them in English, the Sharks. We see him with the team on his 1967 card.
Aparicio, Sr. moved on to another newly founded team in Zulia, known as the Aguilas (Eagles) in 1969 and died of a heart attack on January 1, 1971. He was elected to the Venezuelan Baseball Hall of Fame in 2005.
Here's the reverse of his 1967 card:
It reads, according to Google Translate, as follows:
"Luis the Great of Maracaibo filled a golden age of Venezuela baseball since it debuted in Caracas by the Concordia in the early years of the 30's. Your man has been brilliantly linked to the history of baseball actively until he retired in November 1953, bequeathing in his son Luis Ernesto a worthy representative of fervor and the mystique that he sowed. Professionally he played for Magallanes and Vargas, he works as a coach in La Guaira."
My grammar is off but you get the idea. The Concordia (Eagles) were a well known team from Caracas that in 1934 had players such as Martin Dihigo and Josh Gibson join Aparacio and other Latin American players, laying waste to all teams that faced them, not only in Venezuela but Dominican Republic and Puerto Rican tournament play (twice) as well, truly a legendary squad.
I love the look of the VWL cards in this hard to complete set!
Last week we saw some interesting Topps Baseball shipping cases, taken from the depths of the Fritsch Cards warehouse and auctioned by Collect Auctions. There were other sports represented as well and once again, it's a fascinating peek into how and when Topps got their products out of their warehouse and on to Fritsch's.
Unlike Super Baseball, which was issued in both 1971 and 1971, Super Football was "one and done" after a 1970 release. Poor sales and/or the impending consolidation of costs in preparing for their March 1972 IPO were certainly to blame. The shipping case for the set is a colorful one:
Using the "Cummins method" we know Topps packed this case on September 16, 1970, which is a rock solid date for a football issue to my mind.
Next, here is a 1972-73 Basketball wax case:
Easily dated to November 21, 1972, but what intrigues me here are the logos of the Player's Associations for the NBA and ABA, printed right on the shipping case:
While it's possible something predates these, this seems to be the first instance of such "outside' sports-related logos appearing on a Topps case and I have no idea why. Perhaps it was a requirement laid down by both associations but it's pretty neat.
We can't forget about hockey, can we? Here's a 1973-74 Topps Hockey shipping case:
December 11, 1973 is when this vending case was packed. I really dislike that Stepford Kid Topps used on these cartons!
Well it's definitely spring auction season around the hobby and all sorts of amazing things are being offered, often from long term collections or holdings that are being broken up. One of the more interesting aggregations of items I've seen so far concerns Topps shipping cases, which hail from the Larry Fritsch warehouse and were recently gaveled at Collect Auctions. Fritsch still sells cards to the public but have been using Collect to auction various vintage items from their immense inventory. Generally, I prefer not to pick images from a single source for my posts but this was such a concentration of cases, I couldn't resist. Let's look at some Baseball offerings.
Here's a 1970 Baseball vending case:
The move of production from Brooklyn to Duryea, Pennsylvania in 1966 led to an the accompanying change of manufacturing information on their confectionery packs around mid-1969. However, items like vending boxes that had no gum often showed their origin as the latter.
Now, the fun part as the packing code reads: 311601. Deciphering that using the "Cummins method" we get July 16, 1970. While it's certainly not clear exactly which series was packed using this code, a reasonable guess, with seven distinct series in 1970, would run from the 5th to the 7th series. However, it appears the good workers in the Fritsch warehouse have solved this riddle for us:
That "T70-7" suffix, may not be 100% definitive given the vagaries of storage in such a joint but I spent two years working in a shipping warehouse during college and once you opened a case to pull product, the remaining items never went anywhere else. So I make this to be a high number shipping carton with about a 95% level of certainty.
If this is indeed a high number case, then Topps Baseball packing dates for series 1 likely start in January. That makes sense, with a new series coming out roughly every month and I can attest Football cards were showing up in the stores by me as a kid by the middle of August and they were always started after Baseball concluded.. The initial release date for sports products seems to have crept earlier and earlier as the years passed - 1952 Topps Baseball didn't roll of the presses until the latter part of February. IIRC by the early 1980's, December "prior" saw the first Baseball cards of the new season.
Next, we do get a little mystery. This is described as a 1970 Super Baseball case. It's a cool one, dig the Pete Rose graphic:
OK, first things first. It's an X-out case, meaning it was non-returnable. Topps would also mark the boxes with big, black magic marker X's but this is the first one I've seen where it's stamped on a shipping carton. The packing code date is January 21, 1971. Wait, what?! Well the same wrapper and I believe the same box (or the majority of the graphics at least) were used for both the 1970 and 1971 releases of this product. As January seems very early for a supplemental issue, which generally seem to have been tied to the baseball season already being well underway, given the X-out, this seems like 1970 overstock being sent to Fritsch. Also, note the address has switched to Duryea on the shipping carton.
1973 also presents an anomaly:
Well, you can see the problem if you've been parsing the codes along with me. January 17, 1974 seems to be the packing date but if you look just above it, part of another code can be seen. I think that's the original packing date, which comes across July 11 (and I assume 1973). Maybe this case was never shipped originally, or used for a repack with markered X-out boxes. There's some extra bits below the 1974 stamps as well, possibly marking this as non-returnable as no X code is seen.
Here's a final Baseball case, from 1975:
At last, a code that makes sense: February 13, 1975. Huzzah!
We've been looking at 1952 for the good part of a month now but today let's travel 22 years into that future for a look at the 1974 Topps Stamp Albums. Continuing a tradition started in 1961 and 1962, where stamps were inserted in regular issue Baseball packs and a separate, large album was sold for ten cents, their second full-fledged effort at producing a stand-alone set of baseball stamps (1969 saw the first), was a colorful affair. Packaged as a self-contained combo of a handful of stamps and a mini album (one for each team) for a mere dime, the 1974 release should have been a hit based upon past experience and results.
Except it wasn't and vast mounds of uncut stamp panels, in a 2x6 array, survived, often found with tightly cropped ends. Up until five or six years ago complete stamp production runs of the 24 different panels, all with close cropped left ends, could be found on eBay for a relative pittance, presumably from a never-folded large stash, and always offered in a nice, neat stack. As you will note, there are but ten players for each team, so this means 48 subjects were double printed. Complete sets in full or partial panel form are still offered, as are incomplete production runs of 22/24 full panels, with the best two HOF-subject rich panels removed. Mostly these seem to be partially disincorporated stock or pack contents, as the original stash, which was always sold in full 24 sheet production run form, seems to have dried up.
As for the albums, they are tough items today, especially if the team has one of the ongoing hobby superstars on its roster (think Ryan, Rose, Yaz) and it's not exactly clear what caused the obvious population mismatch between stamps and albums today. I've addressed the 1974 set previously but recently found some production items that are interesting.
First though, let's take a look at what was being sold. The pack is a typical one used by Topps for tests at the time and with no pricing (that would have been on the generic test boxes). The assumption is these were sold for ten cents but with no extant test boxes or scans available, it's not certain. In fact, Topps may have attempted a higher price point, or even multiple ones, dooming, or perhaps skewing, the test:
As mentioned above, the stamps were colorful and surviving panels usually found with the left ends cropped so tightly that no border is visible. As the wrapper states, a dozen stamps were inside these were folded twice vertically. The pack inserted panels usually. have a typical wavy cut along the top and bottom borders, whereas the "stash" panels are symmetrical.
This is from the stash:
That's a fabulous sheet of course, as I count six hall-of-famers! This one is from a pack, surf's up with that wave!
You see that kind of cut, or worse, on Bazooka Joe comics all the time.
As for the albums, whereas Topps used a somewhat drab orange color scheme for all the 1969 mini albums, they went with a much more eye-catching palette in 1974:
The facsimile signatures on the back page revealed who would be found with a space for affixing within:
Proofs are known:
That appears to be a proof for colors matching. I think this one is too, even though both seem to have full color:
This gives you a flavor of the interiors:
The table of contents is a really nice touch:
The failure of this set put the kibosh on similar future issues of this ilk, until Topps introduced sticker and album combos in 1982, bringing in a new style of small, sticky novelties..
There I was, surfing the web, when I saw her, a red tinged beauty; she looked disorderly, wild. I knew she was trouble but couldn't turn away....OK, I'm no Raymond Chandler but we do have a Marlowe sized mystery on our hands today folks.
I was recently pulling images of uncut 1952 Topps panels together for my April Fools Day post about salesman samples when I came across one that blew up my basic understanding of how the landmark 1952 set was issued. It's been assumed by everybody and anybody that the six series were issued like this, with one appearing every month or so beginning in late February or early March:
Nice and orderly, planned in ordinal progression, with iterations of ten prevailing, excepting the last series, known by hobbyists as the high numbers and referred to by Topps at the time of issue as the second or "new" series. Easy, peasey, right?
Well, maybe things weren't so orderly after all.
These are the main production facts for each series that I can actually verify:
The first 80 cards can be found with black or red backs. (thanks, Capt. Obvious!)
The 3rd series can be found, rarely, with gray backs in addition to the far more common white.
The 6th series has three double prints.
Here's some panels from the 1st series, the first is from REA of course and has some great detail on printing dates:
That is the top left corner of one of the slits, all nice and neat:
1-5
11-15
21-25
31-35
Here's another, from the Spring 1982 issue of Baseball Cards magazine:
Two quads, which look to have been cleaved from the same slit (hard to see here but the cuts line up) and also suggest the sheet was designed in 5 x 5 sections as the right side does not really line up the neatlines (the black line around each image) when compared to the left. And we wonder why there's so many miscut cards! Anyway, these run:
51-60
41-50 (with the Sain/Page pair that led to flipped backs in at least one press run, but hold that thought)
51-60 again
61-70
71-80
So this represents the last forty cards of the first series (hold that thought too), with one double printed row. We know Topps used two 100 card slits for 1952, so the double printed row makes sense as a total of four rows would need to be double printed to have the half sheets work out, seemingly two per slit (yup, hold that thought).
Friend o'the Archive John Moran sent along the next three panels. The first is the most complete:
That reads:
66-70
56-60
66-70 again
76-80
36-40
This could be to be the right side quad from from the same slit as the one above it. Next up is this bad boy:
This one sure looks like it's from the bottom two rows of a slit.
31-35
21-25
Now we get to one that's hard on the eyes, it looks like printer's scrap of what would I think would be from a proof sheet (more on this below) but the order of two passes can be discerned:
Of the cards where you can see more of the subject than not:
37-39 (Snider, Westlake, Trout)
27-29 (Jethroe, Priddy, Kluszewski)
---Gutter---
57-59 (Lopat, Mahoney, Roberts)
47-49 (Jones, Page, Sain)
These are overlaid with portions of the second series run, so clearly the first series cards were on a waste sheet, likely just to run off some ink before printing the actual proofs:
117-119 (Lollar, Raffensberger, McDermott)
127-129 (Minner, Bollweg, Mize)
---Gutter---
87-89 (Coogan, Feller, Lipon)
97-99 (Torgeson, Pierce, Woodling)
It looks like a third impression, a very misaligned part of a name, is also visible on Page/Pierce proof.
Here's that second series partial proof sheet. It's low res but you can definitely tell who's who:
It's a little incomplete on both the left and right sections but if you cobble the rows together across both "slits" you get the entire 50 card 2nd series layout:
81-90
91-100
101-110
111-120
121-130
Each side extrapolates to a five row repeat. This all makes perfect sense. However, in 2017, REA auctioned this little sucker off, and it defies all logic:
If you're still with me, that's:
76-80
81-85
WTF?
The logic has always been that since the black backs run from nos. 1-80, with the Page and Sain errors was corrected, the black run continuing then with those two having their intended backs, then a third run, solely red backed, finished off the series. Based on this, it should stand to reason those first eighty cards were printed together and formed all of series 1. Another bit of logic has been that the cards run in sequence from x1-x0 in each row. That's definitely not what we're seeing here. And they are most certainly red backs:
You would really need to see the full, two slit press sheets for each series to be sure of what's what (maybe, this kind of upends that idea) but man, I have questions...Did Topps start mixing in second series cards with the first series? Why are the sequences seemingly mismatched on this panel? Did they only do it once they started printing the red back series 1 cards? Did they do this through all of the first five series? Were these intended for a different use than wax packs?
And still more questions. There's been a video circulating of a Canadian TV show looking at the "Sportscard Phenomenon of the 90's" that has a number of interesting segments (and a bewildering John Candy cameo):
If you go to the 20:00 mark, you will see an unopened box of 1952 Topps Baseball nickel packs was uncovered at the OPC plant in London, Ontario. The box was later described by Mastro Auctions in their April 22, 2004 auction catalog as being from both the fifth and sixth series, the latter being the high numbers of course.
Well, OK-I'm not sure there's any way to prove both series were sold together even by looking at some of the slabbed packs and even then there's no guarantee as to how that box was put together. Did Topps just mix fifth and sixth series packs for Canadian distribution? Maybe US distribution too (remember the Mr. Mint find had semi-highs and highs possibly from the same shipping carton)? Did someone at OPC assemble a box from whatever was on hand and just leave it behind?
Plus, you know, can you even believe Mastro?
I've got some further thoughts on all of this but I'd like to hear from the readers here if any more hybrid panels, packs and boxes are known in 1952.
